


Baby Girl

by bendingsignpost



Series: Tumblr Fic [26]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Magic, Angst with a Happy Ending, Animal Transformation, Canon-Typical Violence, Castiel is a Milton (Supernatural), Cowboy Dean Winchester, Cowboy Sam Winchester, Gen, Horses, Magician Castiel (Supernatural)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-19 15:21:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20211943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingsignpost/pseuds/bendingsignpost
Summary: “I’ll do it,” Sam volunteers, shouting over the horse’s screams. He dismounts and draws his pistol.“No,” Dean chokes out, getting himself in between. “You can’t.”“Dean,” Sam says, sagging with the weight of a decision already made. He doesn’t aim the pistol at Dean, nor at Baby behind him, but Baby’s thrashing and cries makes Sam’s point for him.“Don’t,” Dean insists, backing up, crouching down.Maybe he thinks. Maybe he panics.Either way, he looks up at Sam and says, “I need you to call in a favor for me.”





	Baby Girl

**Author's Note:**

> emiliaoagi said:  
Are you still taking requests? If so, how about Magician/Wild West?

Dean’s done a lot of stupid shit in his life. 

Hell, going West in the first place was a pile of stupid in response to a mountain of stupid. There’s certain things you can’t recover from out on the east coast, and Dean had duly fled to a far more lawless territory, Sam mercifully in tow. 

Dean’s done a lot of shit he regrets too. 

Some of that mountain of stupid, for example. Some of the illegal parts, though not all. The crimes committed in the aftermath of the crimes he’d actually meant to commit. The men killed when they’d come to kill him over the deaths of men he’d set out to murder. People he’d thought he could trust, or love. 

But of all the stupid, of all the regrettable, this is it. 

The big one. 

The haunting of his soul.

The hole in his goddamn heart. 

“I’ll do it,” Sam volunteers, shouting over the horse’s screams. He dismounts and draws his pistol. 

Limping, tears blinding him worse than the dust or the sun in his eyes, Dean gets himself in between. “No,” he chokes out. “You can’t.”

“Dean,” Sam says, sagging with the weight of a decision already made. He doesn’t aim the pistol at Dean, nor at Baby behind him, but Baby’s thrashing and cries makes Sam’s point for him. 

“Don’t,” Dean insists, backing up, crouching down. There’s no chance of his girl rolling over, no threat of her flailing hooves reaching him on this side. He touches her neck as she whips her head against the dirt, bellowing in pain. “Sam, c’mon, we can’t...”

“No vet can fix this,” Sam tells him needlessly.

“I know that!” Dean shouts, rubbing at his eyes with a dusty sleeve, only making the sting worse. “So we gotta... we gotta...”

Dean coughs. And it is a cough, not a sob. 

Maybe he thinks. Maybe he panics. 

Either way, he looks up at Sam and says, “I need you to call in a favor for me.”

Sam frowns and asks, “Who?”

Dean tells him. 

“That’s crazy,” Sam says. 

“Get him,” Dean says, not listening, unable to listen to anything other than Baby’s distress. “Bring him. If he can’t help, then...” His eyes fall to Sam’s pistol, the pearl-gripped twin of his own. 

Sam nods, mounts his horse, and rides away. 

  


  


  


  


If the wait is long for Dean, it’s even longer for Baby. 

“I’m sorry,” he keeps saying, keeps telling her. He sits on the ground above the saddle. When she’s calmer, or maybe simply exhausted, he risks getting closer to her head, risks letting her see him with those wide and panicked eyes. “It’s gonna be all right, girl, I promise.” 

He tries not to look at her leg, but it’s all he can see. 

So stupid. So fucking stupid, it was only a goddamn trot down the same road they’ve been down countless times, a hundred times. Not a gallop, not a canter, a fucking _trot_, but that fucking rock, that stupid piece in this goddamn dirt road, all it had to do was turn in its little hole, and then the snap. 

God, the snap. 

That fucking noise. 

Even when Baby screams, it hurts less to hear than that snap had. 

She hadn’t landed hard on him, a good girl to the end. She hadn’t lashed out at him, hadn’t harmed him in anyway. And now all he can do is stroke her sweaty neck and whisper and promise all sorts of untrue things. 

His girl, his Baby. Her daddy had been John Winchester’s own stallion, and now with both man and stallion gone—both by unnatural causes, but both avenged—now Baby’s all that’s left. 

_There’s Sam_, a small corner of his heart wants to say, but he knows it ain’t true. Sam’s not part of Dad, has never been part of Dad. There’s Baby, and there’s the pistols, and that’s it, that’s all, save their surname, that remains. 

Dean swats the flies off her, wipes the sweat off her neck with his dirty hanky, and keeps from screaming himself as her breathing goes labored. Stuck out under the sun, slowly burning up, that’s no way for his girl to go. 

He’d been wrong. He should’ve let Sam do it. 

“I’m so fucking sorry,” Dean tells her. 

Struggling for breath, Baby looks up at him with more desperation than understanding, no longer trying to get up, no longer trying to fight. 

Dean wipes his eyes again. 

He stands up. 

He draws his pistol. 

He squares up. Makes sure it’ll be a clean shot, makes sure it won’t hurt her any more than she’s already been hurt. 

And then he freezes, waiting for something, anything to stop him. 

Thank fucking god Sam does. 

The rumble of hooves in the distance has Dean sighing, his hand dropping as his shoulders slump. He falls to his knees, tears tumbling free with the motion. He kneels there next to Baby’s long, sleek head. With the hand not holding his pistol, he rubs at the base of her ears, each in turn, the way she likes. 

Sam comes in at a trot, the town oddity behind him. Castiel Milton is a strange one, to say the least, a doctor who calls himself a magician instead, but Dean’s good with people, even when those people are very bad with people themselves. Hence the debt, hence the favor. 

Castiel Milton dismounts from his own gelding. There’s a carpet bag slung over shoulder, and he immediately drops it to the ground and opens it up, pulling out first a large sheet. He’s unfolding it before he thinks to say so much as a “Hello, Mr. Winchester” and he’s handing one side of it to Sam before he explains what it’s for. 

“We’re covering her,” Castiel Milton says once Dean demands to know what he’s doing. 

Dean doesn’t move from where he kneels. “Can you fix the leg?”

Looking Baby over, Castiel Milton shakes his head. “Not the leg or the horse, but I can save the rest.”

“What the fuck does that mean.”

Milton looks at him, and Milton looks at him hard. “It means I can save the rest,” he repeats. “It’s that or nothing.”

“Dean,” Sam starts to say. 

“Will it hurt her?” Dean asks. 

“No worse than dying, and she already is,” Milton answers bluntly. 

Aware and unashamed of the tear tracks down his cheeks, Dean cusses but nods. “Fine, do it, whatever it takes.”

Milton directs Sam to help him cover Baby, all save her head. They’re careful getting the cloth over her legs, spreading the sheet between them and carrying it over her, across her, without putting themselves in kicking range. The danger of another thrash is decreasing with each heaving breath, but it’s still there. Baby’s a fighter, always has been. 

“Stay by her head, Winchester, where she can see you,” Milton instructs, and Dean does. He rubs at her ears and murmurs absurdities of affection against every bit of pain bubbling in her throat. 

“I’m going to need a knife,” Milton adds. “As sharp as you have, if you have one sharper than mine.” He pulls one from his carpet bag, but Sam’s is better. 

“What’s that for,” Dean asks without wanting to. 

“For when it’s time,” Milton answers, moving around, down to flank and tail. He kneels there, sliding one hand down to her belly. He sets the knife down and puts both hands there, eyes closed.

Breathing, uneven. 

In time with Baby.

In time with, somehow, the wind. 

“Tell me when it’s time,” Milton murmurs. 

“I don’t know what you mean,” Dean says. 

“You will.”

Baby makes less and less noise. Her eye still follows Dean, still fixes upon him, but even that’s growing sluggish instead of alarmed, or even pained. 

Something strange happens from one breath to the next. Something intrinsic, something important. 

It’s gone. 

Though still alive, this horse has the glassy-eyed stare of a broken down nag, of a concussed beast of burden that doesn’t know Dean at all. 

“It’s time,” Dean says. 

Milton nods. “Mr. Sam, cover his eyes,” he says. 

“What-”

From behind, Sam more than covers Dean’s eyes. He puts his whole arm around Dean’s head, across Dean’s face, and standing over Dean’s legs, Sam holds him restrained. 

There’s a rip. 

There’s a tear.

There’s a scream. 

“NO!” Dean bellows, but Sam holds him back, wrestles him back. 

It’s a hard scrap, but Dean fights his over-sized brother off. He gets his sight back and scrambles to his girl’s side, covered in dirt-filled sweat and dust-filled tears. 

Shirtsleeves rolled back and bloody to the elbows, Castiel Milton pulls at the incision he’s carved into Baby’s belly. 

Dean’s stomach heaves. 

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” Dean screams, and Sam’s not fucking stopping him now. Dizziness and grief may slow Dean, but what stops him, what stops Dean is the strangest, most unexpected noise. 

It’s a whimper. 

Inhuman and high-pitched. 

A whimper. 

Out of the blood and entrails, Castiel Milton pulls something squirming, something dark and small. Maybe half the size of a human baby. Milton wraps it in some of the bloody sheet and cuts that part of the sheet free with Sam’s knife. This writhing bundle, Milton cleans with middling success. 

“Water,” Milton instructs placidly. 

After a pause filled only by the whimpers from the wrapped sheet, Sam’s footsteps crunch the way back to his own horse. Sam returns and hands Milton his canteen. 

Milton unwraps and washes off the thing. The creature. 

“Is that a puppy,” Dean asks dumbly. 

Milton looks up at him, now having trouble holding the tiny dog still. It is, indeed, a puppy. Black and small, fur short, ears pointed, eyes already open. 

“Yes,” Milton answers. “I told you. Not the horse. Not the leg.” He indicates the puppy’s rear leg, singular. Two in the front, but only one in the back. “I’ve saved what was left.”

“But...”

Arms still bloody where Sam’s water hasn’t washed them clean, Milton stands. He holds the puppy out toward Dean, and the little thing immediately begins to squirm all the harder, its exceptionally hairy tail wagging at fully speed. It yips, its front paws waving in midair with a frantic run. 

Dean takes it. 

Holds it. 

Sees her. 

He holds her up to his face, marveling. 

She licks the tear tracks from his cheeks. 

In front of Dean, Castiel Milton cleans himself off as best he’s able. Sam moves the sheet down to cover both wound and leg, and as much blood as possible, and then Sam and Milton both set about pulling Dean’s saddle and gear free. 

The puppy in Dean’s hands doesn’t like that, doesn’t like that at all. When Dean tentatively sets her down, the pup doesn’t waste time learning to walk, instead floundering her way on three legs over to bite at the saddle strap, growling and digging her paws into the dirt. 

Numb, Dean holds out his hands. Sam hefts the saddle onto Dean’s left shoulder, and the pup stops growling. She wobbles over to sit on Dean’s boot, looking up at him expectantly and entirely ignoring the horse corpse mere feet away. 

“Baby,” Dean says. 

The pup barks, ears pricked forward, tail thumping. 

“I’d call us even, Mr. Winchester,” Castiel Milton says, breaking the roaring silence inside Dean’s mind. 

“I’d... yes,” Dean agrees, unable to look away from the pup. 

Sam loads Dean’s saddlebag onto his own horse, leaving the pair of them alone with Baby. With both of her. 

Unable to think, unable to speak, Dean simply holds out his hand. 

Blood still under his fingernails, Castiel Milton shakes it.

“Thank you,” Dean manages to say. 

“Bring her around from time to time,” Milton answers, never one for the obvious show of manners. Normally, that’s something Dean likes about him, but now, it unnerves all the worse. “I’d like to see how she grows up.”

“I will,” Dean promises. 

Milton nods, closes his carpet bag without reclaiming his bloody sheet, and departs. Dean on foot, Sam on horseback, both moving at a walk, the brothers watch him go, looking over their shoulders at the retreating magician. 

Beside Dean, her head not even reaching the tops of Dean’s boots, Baby trots along home. 

**Author's Note:**

> As always, to see what else I'm working on, you can follow me on [tumblr here](http://bendingsignpost.tumblr.com/).


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